Daily Archives: 05/08/2012

I went looking for house templates, after making my two from book templates that are from a copyright-protected book that is out of print. I hoped I might find a template by the author of a similar style. No such luck. But I did find this site, Ravens Blight, that has a number of printable house templates. The sheets to print can be downloaded as PDFs so you need only cut and assemble, but yo could print them and use them as true templates to create blank areas to decorate. I imagine you could also edit them to alter the templates with your own decor.

There are a couple I really like. The Cliff House is fairly simple to construct, and pretty nifty. Only 8 pages, and nothing that is crazy difficult. I really like the rocky base on this one.

And the Ghost House is pretty complex but has a hidden compartment under it that coul be fun. The PDF is 22 pages of patterns, and the instructions are another 10 pages, so not one to be attempted lightly!

But that isn’t all they have. There is a working pinhole camera model, masks, coffins, stand-up monsters, chess sets, greeting cards and more. How cool is this little stand up Horror High Street? In comes with either a moonlight backdrop (seen here) or a fiery sunset one.

And OMG, how amazing is this ship? Lots of possibilities for that, I think.

While these models are complicated and take a lot of printing-pages to create, they are pretty amazing. I’ve draft printed the Cliff House one on plain paper, just to test it out, and I have to say it goes together like a dream. The instructions are clear, although they might be easier in list format, with the accompanying photos with the text, but it’s still not hard as they are. If this is not your sort of thing for crafty purposes, I think that kids would have a BLAST with these on a wet summer day, trapped inside.

There are 100s of tiny little houses, many of which look very similar. Google them and you’ll find them. But here are a few I found that look like they might work well.

This one, from CK and by Cindy Tobey, lacks the 3D effect, but it could easily be created then stuck to a box to stand up:

This one, from Country Home, is designed as a mantle decoration housing tealights, but it could easily be altered by either cutting the templates from patterned card, or inking and stamping as I did with mine. There are templates for a church, a storefront, and two houses.

This really cute one is the Harvest Houses one from the now-defunct Victoria Magazine. My searching discovered some cute samples of this project but it took the WayBack Machine to find a snapshot of the original page at the magazine site. Clicking this will download the PDF. This sample is from a Field Journal. She has another sample there as well. These houses are not big, but the template is easy enough to increase in size, making a larger template you can stick together.